PMC
(Nasdaq:PMCS) is the semiconductor and software solutions innovator transforming
networks that connect, move and store big data. Building on a track record of
technology leadership, the company is driving innovation across storage, optical
and mobile networks. PMC's highly integrated solutions increase performance and
enable next-generation services to accelerate the network transformation. For
more information, visit www.pmcs.com.

Prior to its acquisition by
Microsemi in
January 2016 PMC
didn't enter the list of top 25 SSD companies based on search volume but it got
really close having got to being listed #26 in
Q3 2015.

As
we've often seen in the past 9 years of publishing this list those companies
which show promise (measured by reactions in the SSD market) are very likely to
go to the top of SSD
acquisition search lists. And when I talk to potential SSD company buyers
and investors the
importance of this list as a sanity check filter (other things being equal) is
well understood and recognized.

PMC - which
a
decade ago in these pages was well known as a
RAID controller and
storage adapter IP company - has now become a significant influence in the
enterprise SSD market by a series of
acquisitions.

From 2007 to 2014 - the
dominant focus and center of SSD accelerator gravity was PCIe SSDs.

It was the rapid domino-effect adoption of 3rd party PCIe SSD
accelerators by every mainstream server manufacturer - which changed the way
that SSDs were perceived from being an alienlike technology promoted by industry
outsiders to being a necessary option which was expected to be supported inside
every new server product line.

But the next chapter of the fast SSD accelerator story looks more
like a DIMM.

"Almost every
combination of test kit we have tried has failed in some way. Sometimes
failing to come back up again nicely, sometimes with a full
BSOD which will almost
certainly have risked data loss."

"... the transition
from SATA SSDs to NVMe SSDs seems to be accelerating. People seem to be getting
the message that NVMe is designed, from the ground up, to work with non-volatile
memory and is a much better protocol for SSDs than SATA."

IDT shipped the worlds first NVM Express (NVMe) flash controller. PMC
believes that it will be able to improve its time-to-market in the
PCIe SSD market by
approximately 2 years due to the early product leadership and a robust design
win pipeline.

Greg
Lang, President and CEO of PMC said - IDTs PCIe controllers are
particularly well suited for server-based SSDs targeted at
cloud data center
customers. The acquisition of IDTs Enterprise Flash Controller Business is a
strong complement to our current enterprise 12Gb/s
SAS SSD controller
product offering.